oppose war by an Image (or a group of images), as one might be enrolled among the opponents of capital punishment by reading, sa); Dreiser's An American Trag- edy or Turgenev's "The Execution of Troppmann," an account of a night spent with a notorious criminal who is about to be guillotined? A narrative seems likely to be more effective than an image. Partly it is a question of the length of time one is obliged to look, and to feel. No photograph, or portfolio of photographs, can unfold, go further, and further still, as does The Ascent (1977), by the Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko, the most affecting film about the horror of war I know. Among single antiwar images, the huge photograph that Jeff Wall made in 1992 entitled "Dead Troops Talk (A vi- sion after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Mghanistan, winter 1986)" seems to me exemplary in its thoughtfulness, coherence, and passion. The antithesis of a document, the pic- ture, a Cibachrome transparency seven and a half feet high and more than thir- teen feet wide and mounted on a light box, shows figures posed in a landscape, a blasted hillside, that was constructed in the artist's studio. Wall, who is Ca- nadian, was never in Mghanistan. The ambush is a made-up event in a con- flict he had read about. His imagination of war (he cites Goya as an inspiration) is in the tradition of nineteenth-century history painting and other forms of history-as-spectacle that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries-just before the invention of the camera-such as tableaux vivants, wax displays, dioramas, and panoramas, which made the past, especially the im- mediate past, seem astonishingl); dis- turbingly real. The figures in Wall's visionary photo- work are "realistic," but, of course, the image is not. Dead soldiers don't talk. Here they do. Thirteen Russian soldiers in bulky winter uniforms and high boots are scat- tered about a pocked, blood-splashed pit lined with loose rocks and the litter of war: shell casings, crumpled metal, a boot that holds the lower part of a leg. The soldiers, slaughtered in the So- viet Union's own late folly of a colo- nial war, were never buried. A few still have their helmets on. The head of one 98 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 9, 2002 kneeling figure, talking animatedly, foams with his red brain matter. The atmosphere is warm, convivial, frater- nal. Some slouch, leaning on an elbow, or sit, chatting, their opened skulls and destroyed hands on view. One man bends over another, who lies on his side in a posture of heavy sleep, per- haps encouraging him to sit up. Three men are horsing around: one with a huge wound in his belly straddles an- other, who is lying prone, while the third, kneeling, dangles what might be a watch before the laughing man on his stomach. One soldier, helmeted, legless, has turned to a comrade some distance awa); an alert smile on his face. Below him are two who don't seem quite up to the resurrection and lie supine, their bloodied heads hangIng down the stony incline. Engulfed by the image, which is so accusatory, one could fantasize that the soldiers might turn and talk to us. But no, no one is looking out of the picture at the viewer. There's no threat of protest. They're not about to yell at us to bring a halt to that abomination which is war. They are not represented as terrifying to others, for among them (far left) sits a white-garbed Afghan scavenger, entirely absorbed in going through somebody's kit bag, of whom they take no note, and entering the picture above them (top right), on the path winding down the slope, are two Mghans, perhaps soldiers themselves, who, it would seem from the Kalash- nikovs collected near their feet, have al- ready stripped the dead soldiers of their weapons. These dead are supremely un- interested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses-or in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? "We"- this "we" is everyone who has never ex- perienced anything like what they went through-don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dread- ful, how terrifying war is-and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every sol- dier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right. . I' I I I, /' ,' \ i . , ... I"" " t <' . ,\# , \ "r \"'. , \ ....' , /100 /l I ),. . \ . rr j/P ðjP5 '* , 1 _ I'1f. + ;} , " / (;1 i. b (,,'..... '- " \.\ <..- " ) \ \ I ....' '"-' -' \ - _\.-\ ,, .,S , - CANDYLAND In Gerald Scaife's drawÍ1 wear cartoon gas masks and carry machine gu